None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Hepatitis C is a condition that if often treated successfully with interferon. However, interferon treatment is known to cause mood problems, including high rates of depression. One possible reason for this is that interferon is thought to affect the brains serotonin system, which governs mood and other emotional tasks such as recognising facial expressions. To date nobody has studied how the brain functioning of this system changes during interferon treatment. Discovering how interferon causes depression will help us to provide more effective treatment, or prevention, of this for future patients undergoing interferon treatment. It may also help us discover what is happening to the brain in other forms of depression. The purpose of this study is to measure how the recognition of facial expressions changes with interferon treatment and whether this varies with the levels of tryptophan in your blood (tryptophan is a chemical that the body uses to make serotonin). This will give us a measure of how the brains serotonin system changes during interferon treatment and whether this can be linked to the development of depression. This will be done by a computer program which shows pictures of different facial expressions and asks you to decide what emotion they are displaying. Patients with hepatitis C treated with interferon will demonstrate measurable changes in facial expression processing. Specifically, there will be a change towards that seen in acute tryptophan depletion and depressive episodes; a decreased ability to detect happy faces and an increased ability to detect sad faces. Secondary hypotheses are: the ability to detect angry faces will increase with interferon treatment and will correlate with the irritability measures; the changes in emotional processing will be accompanied with changes in mood and anxiety, and a measurable decrease in the tryptophan/large neutral amino-acid ratio, rather than an increase in the kynurenine/kynurenic acid ratio. We also predict that those already showing depression-like processing of facial expressions and/or those with lower tryptophan/large neutral amino-acid ratios will be more likely to become depressed during the course of treatment.
Interventions
1) Eligable Hepatitis Cpatients patients who are going to be treated with interferon-alpha +/- ribavarin will be observed for changes before and 6 weeks into treatment for changes in recognition of facial expressions, mood, anxiety and anger scales and psychiatric diagnosis. The combined duration of these assessments is approximately 2 hours. In addition a healthy control group will also be observed using the same measures.
2) The duration of the trial is roughly 7 weeks - one assessment one we
1) Eligable Hepatitis Cpatients patients who are going to be treated with interferon-alpha +/- ribavarin will be observed for changes before and 6 weeks into treatment for changes in recognition of facial expressions, mood, anxiety and anger scales and psychiatric diagnosis. The combined duration of these assessments is approximately 2 hours. In addition a healthy control group will also be observed using the same measures. 2) The duration of the trial is roughly 7 weeks - one assessment one week prior to interferon treatment and one six weeks into treatment. In addition for the duration of interferon treatment (usually six to twelve months) patients will be reassessed for psychiatric diagnosis if the treating team feel there has been the possibility of an emerging psychiatric illness.
Sponsors
United Bristol Hospitals
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Hepatitis C patients. Receiving interferon treatment
Exclusion criteria
Current mental illness at time of starting interferon treatment including drug and alcohol abuse. Past history of schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder. Current unstable medical illness, current use of antidepressants.
Outcome results
None listed